Though modern transcontinental
travelers tend to see NEBRASKA in much the same light
as did the early pioneers, heading west during the Gold Rush
- as just another dreary expanse of prairie to get through as
fast as possible - this flat and sparsely populated state in
fact encompasses quite a few places of interest. However, its
most appealing cities, commercial Omaha and the livelier state capital,
Lincoln , are separated by a good three
hundred miles of underwhelming, livestock-rearing flatlands from
the western Panhandle, where the landscape finally erupts into
giant sand hills and valleys, broken by towering rocky columns
and hemmed in by sheer-faced buttes.
Western Nebraska was still
embroiled in vicious and bloody battles against Native Americans
long after the east had been settled; from the first serious
uprising in 1854, it was 36 years before the US Army could make
white control unchallengeable. Close to the South
Dakota state line,
Fort Robinson , where Crazy Horse was murdered, remains one of
the West's most evocative historic sites.
Without navigable rivers,
Nebraska had to rely on the railroads to help populate the land.
During the 1870s and 1880s, rail companies, encouraged by grants
that allowed them to accumulate one-sixth of the state, laid
down such a comprehensive network of tracks that virtually every
farmer was within a day's cattle drive of the nearest halt. Thus
the buffalo-hunting country of the Sioux and Pawnee was turned
into high-yield farmland, which today has few rivals in terms
of beef production.
THE UNITED STATES OF
AMERICA